ered his D Day work one of his most significant achievements. Early in 1944, the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the C.I.A.) had dispatched Ford to a secret labora- tory at London's Denham Studio where films of the Allied war effort were processed and edited. Upon arriving, Ford announced to the head of the op- eration, "I'm in command, you're sec- ond. I'll take the toughest spot, you take the second-toughest spot." Ford's pos- turing notwithstanding, what were re- ally the toughest assignments went to Brick Marquard and Junius Stout: they were the lead cameramen whom Ford selected to go ashore with Army Rangers , , ,"1: , assembled shots to be spliced together afterward in a film," Ford recalled of his own experience. "I was too busy do- ing what I had to do for a cohesive pic- ture of what I did to register in my mind. . . . I was reminded of that line in 'The Red Badge of Courage' about how the soldiers were always busy, al- ways deeply absorbed in their individual b " com ats. M ELVYN PAISLEY was a fighter pilot in the war, and afterward he never forgot either the shock of crimson blood or the deceivingly peaceful beauty of the skies he had pierced in his silver P-47 Thunderbolt. He could always con- , , 35 Army Air Forces' role in defeating the Axis powers. On Amold's orders, motion- picture cameras were attached to two P-47s to film a massive dive-bombing raid on the Rhine Valley. Now, in Phil- adelphia, as the images of Arnold's foot- age lit up the screen, Vicki Paisley sud- denly shouted, "Look, Mel! That's you!" And, sure enough, there was her hus- band, all of twenty years old, as Hap Arnold pinned the Distinguished Ser- vice Cross on his chest at a ceremony in Luxembourg in April of 1945. One of the camera-bearing P-47s, of course, had been Paisley's. "I was flabbergasted," Paisley recalled, "and I formed a partnership with Lars t .... ...(. .,. " \\ ' :":,, , :,. . o ...- :, -.' , I ' ; - :w. ". rllied landing craft off the Normandy coast; and Melvyn Paisley, who discovered the Ford footage with Lars Andersen. in the invasion's first wave, in order to scout the best camera positions for film- ing the action to follow. Even so, Ford opted to reconnoitre the area himself. He fitted certain land- ing craft with automatic cameras, de- signed to start rolling as soon as the landIng ramps were lowered. Ford said that once he got to the beach "I ran for- ward and started placing some of my men behind things so they'd have a chance to expose their film." Even under fire, the director stayed focussed on his craft, and he explained later, "I know it doesn't make it blazingly dramatic, but all I could think was that for the most part everything was all so well coördi- nated, fitted perfectly, went beautifull " Marquard was awarded the Silver Star for his efforts; Stout was killed in N or- mandy, shortly after the invasion. Of course, the big picture of June, 1944, was beyond anyone participant's frame of vision. "My memories of D Day come in disconnected takes like un- jure up memories of the orange fireballs that erupted when a bridge was bombed, the lime-green stretches of fertile Bel- gian farmland, the red-and-black Nazi flags, and, everywhere, the thick seas of mud. Paisley's interest in color was re- awakened in 1996, a year before he read Ambrose's book, at a reunion of P-47 pilots in Philadelphia, where he and his wife, Vicki, met Lars Andersen, an am- ateur military historian and a collector of Second World War films. Andersen was there.to show the pilots his greatest find: color footage from the Special Film Project originated by Henry (Hap) Arnold, the commander of the Army Air Forces in the Second World War. As early as 1940, in an article for Na- tional Geographic, Arnold had written enthusiastically of the military uses of aerial color photograph He understood the technology's public-relations value, too: he wanted to make a full-color record, suitable for wide release, of the Andersen to turn victory in Europe into color, which is the way it was fought." But, apart from the color reels that An- dersen had unearthed, much of them from the National Archives, only a frac- tion of the American color footage of the war in Western Europe had been brought to light. The best known of this was some five hours' worth-includ- ing film of the Nazi death camp at Dachau-that had been shot by George Stevens. The Stevens footage surfaced when the filmmaker's son-George Stevens, Jr., the founding director of the American Film Institute-was cleaning out his father's North Hollywood store- room after his death, in 1975. "I real- ized that I was seeing views that had heretofore been seen only by the men who were part of the greatest seaborne invasion in history/' George Stevens, Jr., later wrote. In 1997, when Paisley set out to find Ford's footage, the prospects looked bleak. Every bureaucrat that Paisley got